Seeing red: critics of better food labels fail to understand public health measures

Prof Olver's article is not just about food labelling -- it is about the neglected issue of health literacy. Prof Olver refers to the potential for better labelling to 'empower consumers' and to the importance of consumers being able to understand the labelling system and distinguish healthy and unhealthy foods. While it may seem fairly obvious that the contribution of menu labelling to inform and guide consumers will be limited 'if consumers’ understanding of calorie or energy intake is poor', it is startling to realise that Australia has no national strategy for health literacy -- the ability to access, interpret and apply health-related information. A 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that that 60% of Australians lack basic health literacy. 'Health' may not always be the determining factor in decisions about food, but health literacy levels should be sufficiently high so that people can at least understand the implications of those decisions.

Labelling should satisfy every shopper's right to know what is in a processed food and how its ingredients were made. Labelling should be informative and objective, not positive or negative - so shoppers can make fully informed choices. Citizens have an unqualified right to informative food labels that give notice of all relevant food product specifications – including country of origin and new processes of production – especially those processes with a limited history of safe use in the human food supply, such as genetic manipulation and irradiation.

Everyone is entitled to make fully informed choices about what they, their families, and animals eat. Only comprehensive, factual and truthful labelling can empower everybody to act in their own best interests, to protect and promote their own health and safety. The absence of informative labels leaves people vulnerable to shopping and eating in ignorance. So-called free marketeers should support full labeling too because markets are distorted when shoppers are systematically denied the full information needed to make the rational choices that are supposed to optimize markets. Secrecy is unacceptable.

Food processors should not promote their wares on food labels. How shoppers would interpret truthful, factual information on labels is outside the responsibilities of regulators. Criteria for the legitimate information allowed on food labels should be set on the basis of community held ethical principles such as precaution, truthfulness, care for animals, care for human beings, respect for the environment, principles of social justice and equity, and human rights. Such principles are the lynchpins of humane societies and many values, such as human rights and the Precautionary Principle, also have standing in international law.

Unfortunately, present policy processes - the Blewett national review of food labelling and Agriculture Minister Ludwig's National Food Plan - serve the interests of the processed food industry, not the adoption of healthy fresh diets. For instance, food Standard 1.5 covers foods that require pre-market assessment because they are genuinely new in the human food supply and have zero or very limited histories of safe use as food. All these novel foods and food ingredients should be labelled without exception but most are not.

Comprehensive food labelling should be non-negotiable.

Surely having food labels is better than no food labels?

I do view the 'traffic light' system as a bit ineffective bacause food has to have flavour from somewhere so as a general rule it will be high in either fat, sugar or salt; an item might be low in one but high in another.

Frankly, through better nutrition awareness that is taught from early on in school, people will begin to make better choices. Also what is unhealthy for one doesn't necessarily affect another- for example today I ate 3 Maccas hamburgers. It's the first time I'd been there in 5 months and I'd just ridden 40km. I think I'll be ok since the rest of my diet is extremely healthy, but boy did that fat and sugar taste nice.

Professor Olver concludes in his piece that we should test the efficacy of food labels before deciding labels don’t work. Good sentiments, but they're completely at odds with his curt dismissal of the results of the real world test of menu labelling in New York City.

Professor Olver writes that my column in the Drum cites (and apparently misinterprets, although no grounds for that accusation is offered) one study to conclude menu labelling won’t work.

This is wrong. I cited five separate studies.

Indeed, the (single) BMJ paper from 2011 which he uses as a rebuttal was mentioned in my column too. But he appears not to have read fully even the abstract of that paper, which said that “mean calories did not change from before to after regulation”. Only three of the eleven chains showed significant reductions in calorie consumption. Yes, those chains accounted for 42% of total customers in the paper’s survey. Any fair reading would admit that the BMJ paper is ambiguous for both our cases. I acknowledged that ambiguity but Professor Olver seems to believe the paper is a slam-dunk for menu labelling.

Perhaps it might be, if he had not completely ignored the Health Affairs and American Economic Review papers, the literature review conducted by the Heart Foundation, as well as the editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which provided the opening sentence for my column.

It is a shame that Professor Olver did not want to seriously engage with the evidence we have regarding this policy.

The rest of his article tackles another topic entirely: the simplification of nutrition labelling on packaged food. How this rebuts the real-world evidence of the efficacy of restaurant menu labelling we now have from New York isn’t clear. Professor Olver writes “it is clearly erroneous to argue that just because one type of label may have not had a massive impact in one instance, all labels are bound to fail” but I can’t find where I said anything of the sort. That’s his argumentative trick, not mine.

It is important that we accurately test public health interventions. But once we have done so, we must be open-minded enough to actually look at the results of those tests.